Blondes may have more fun, but are they taken seriously? The question forms the premise of Legally Blonde, based on the novel of the same title by Amanda Brown, a variation on the plot of Pushkin’s Eugen Onegin with cartoonized characters. Indeed, one particular blonde, Elle Woods (played by Reese Witherspoon), has more fun and insists […]

Construction on the Brooklyn Bridge began in 1869 and was completed in 1883. In Kate and Leopold, Stuart Besser (played by Live Schreiber) finds an H. G. Wellsian “crack in time” on the bridge which transports him from a spring day in 2001 to April 28, 1876, when the dashing Leopold, Duke of Albany (played by

Just One Time, which expands to feature length an eight-minute short in Boy Shorts III (1998), is about a New York City opposite-sex couple who are very much in love and are scheduled to marry in ten days. Prior to exchanging vows before a priest, Anthony (played by Lane Janger, the director and cowriter of the film)

Based on the novel of the same title by Gene Brewer, the film K-PAX is a psychological thriller directed by Iain Softley. All of a sudden in the middle of Grand Central Station, a man appears from nowhere. Seeing a woman whose handbag is being taken from her, he goes to help her. When police arrive, they

Bisexuality is not well understood in cultures that are accustomed to either/or categorizations of human sexuality. Now, the Spanish film I Will Survive (Sobreviveré), directed by Alfonso Albacete and David Menkes, joins the 1999 French film The School of Flesh (L’Ecole de la Chair) in presenting a male lead actor who plays both sides of the fence without apology. When I

Jeepers Creepers, which is supposed to be a horror film, gets its title from a 1930s song. The only things frightening about the movie, however, are a few musical thud sounds, which fail to rescue a plot that director Victor Salva wrote after he viewed The Blair Witch Project (1999) and The Sixth Sense (1999) and then recalled hearing

  Can a gay and a straight man work side by side productively and even help each other in amorous pursuits? In Hit and Runway, directed by Christopher Livingston, an aspiring girlchasing Italian-American screenwriter, Alex Andero (played by Michael Parducci) is enrolled in a course to learn how to write films; his cousin Norman Rizzoli (played

If you saw The Saltmen of Tibet, a 1997 German documentary, you will not be surprised by the rugged life of Tibetans portrayed in Himalaya, a French film subtitled L’enfance d’un chef (The Infancy of a Chief); the film is known as Caravan in Canada. The director is Eric Valli, who lived in the region for several years, assisted

Hearts in Atlantis is based on two short stories from a collection of the same title by Stephen King. The plot is a familiar one: A stranger comes into a small New England town, and unusual events transpire. Whereas The Stranger (1946) featured a fascist after World War II, Hearts in Atlantis, directed by Scott Hicks, gives only obscure

The world gets another opportunity to see how women are treated in a strict Moslem country in Hemlock (Shokaran), directed by Behrooz Afkhami. The country is Iran. Women had some freedoms before the revolution of 1979, when Ayatollah rule began, so the film is yet another example of the recent pressure for liberalization. Afkhami, in fact, has